Wednesday, December 21, 2005

I agree with Gutta: someone with a business head and resources should really hook up with Woebot and set up some kind of Soul Jazz-style "salvage" (copyright John Carney at Tangents) operation with Matt as trawler/compiler in chief.

Talking of Woebot compilations, by coincidence this past weekend I had a stab at pulling together my own equivalent to this. Like Matt I seem to end up doing about two grime comps a year, but this latest one, Grime 2005: the Second Half, has been a pretty desultory affair. Being a much more sporadic buyer than Matt, the CD doesn't offer any kind of reliable survey of the state-of-grime. But it does provide an accurate picture of one individual's waning obsession with a genre. For a start, a couple of the tracks ("Prang Man", "Warpspeed"), I'm pretty sure are 2004 tunes belatedly acquired. And to even reach the 80 minute mark I had to throw in a non-grime killatune ("Request Line") plus the instrumentals of "Prang" and "Warp".

Admittedly I made it harder on myself by deciding to do a separate CD of Terror Danjah/Aftershock family releases, a sequel to Vol 1 (part of a planned grime producer focused Auteur Series, so far just consisting of Terror). I was surprised when Matt wrote that Terror had disappeared, as I seem to have a great stack of Aftershock and Frontline releases and I only made it to the UK twice this year. With the exception of "Not Convinced", though--track #2 on Grime 2005: the Second Half and my tune of the year purely as an instrumental, before you even factor in Bruza and the other guys--none of them really seem like a brand new Danjah template.

Had a bit of fun making a JME hypocrisy sandwich--his two lectures-to-the-scene about guntalk and negativity, "Serious" (one of only two tunes i included that's also on Matt's comp) and "Don't Chat", being the bread (wholemeal, natch), and the cheese in the middle being a prime slice of JME spouting guntalk, threats, etc, "JME Staggering". Otherwise, the one track on Grime 2005: the Second Half besides "Prang", "Warpspeed", "Convinced" and "State Your Name" (and the released version is so markedly not-as-good as the earlier one in circulation, it's painful) that gave me the gonna-smash-it-up rush of prime grime is something I don't even know the title of: Flirta D, I think, with something vaguely misognyist and unpleasant, has this "i know" sneer-hook, keeps calling himself Dirty Flirts, on the flip of a white label titled "Frontline Refix." Any idea?